14th March 2013 Archive

Microsoft has announced that it will ship fixes and updates for the Windows Store apps that come bundled with Windows 8 and Windows RT as soon as they are available, rather than issuing them in batches as it does for the rest of Windows.

Virtualizing entire data centers, including admins for systems and networks

Having let go of its aspirations to be a player higher up in the systems stack – now that application frameworks, caching software, and other elements of the business have been shuffled off to the new Pivotal group established by parent EMC – VMware is doubling down in the virtualization business, and its top brass were banging the software-defined data center (SDDC) drum pretty loudly down at its analyst meeting on Wall Street this morning. They also talked a bit about what VMware is going to do with network virtualizer Nicira, which it bought last summer for a whopping $1.26bn.

The Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) team would like to raise a pint or two today to David Windestål - a Swedish radio-controlled aircraft enthusiast who recently pulled off an impressive "Space Glider" flight from a dizzying 33,000m.

Groupon's troubles just got a little deeper and more widespread, after Australia's Communications and Media Authority (which likes to be called 'the ACMA') issued a “formal warning” that the floundering group buying outfit needs to get its email house in order.

Blue Coat Systems, Microsoft’s Skype and Chinese IM service QQ have all helped repressive states labelled "enemies of the internet" to snoop on their citizens, according to a new cyber censorship report from press freedom group Reporters Without Borders.

Flash, flash and more flash seems to be the order of the day from all vendors; whether that is flash today or flash tomorrow; whether it’s half-baked, yesterday’s left-overs rehashed or an amuse-bouche; 2013 is all about the flash.

AT&T boffins reckon they can fling 400Gb/sec down 12,000km of fibre using a new modulation technique. Meanwhile, IBM's bods say they managed 25Gb/sec over just a few millimetres - but using just 24 milliwatts.

An eight-week notice of the final end has been issued to any remaining customers of ancient ISP Telinco by its owner TalkTalk - which inherited the mail and hosting servers after it bought Tiscali in 2009.

There was an article a while back, in Scientific American I think, that posed the question: given a super-powerful computer, with infinite computing power shoe-horned into a coke can, what would you do with it?*

Walk down the hall. Look into the IT room. How old are the people in there? How are they getting on? Or are they just getting on? Would you trust them to keep the server lights on in a couple of years? Is there anybody actually in there at all?

Object storage start-up Scality has added its storage to Hadoop so users can avoid loading data through Hadoop's own file system. It has also unveiled a plug-in for Cinder, the block storage layer within the OpenStack project.

There’s a prevalent feeling throughout the whole of SimCity 4 that this is the game that Will Wright and Maxis would have liked to have made from day one. That is if graphics technology and PC hardware had been up to the task when the original SimCity was in development.

Oracle has lured Steve Zivanic away from his marketing VP position at enterprise cloud startup Nirvanix. He joins the technology juggernaut as a VP in its Storage Hardware Systems Business Group - home to the Exastuff stuff and storage arrays.

Anticipating where bottlenecks are going to develop in a live database has been one of the most bankable skills any self-respecting database administrator can have, yet researchers may now have figured out a set of algorithms that can do this automatically.

The austerity in Europe over the past several years is taking its toll on the server makers of the world and the companies in the region that most assuredly would love to be spending lots of dough on new software projects and the iron to support it. But they're not – and it's not just Western Europe that's putting a drag on the overall market

The legal team acting for now-deceased internet activist Aaron Swartz has filed an official complaint with the Department of Justice alleging two counts of professional misconduct by Assistant US Attorney Stephen Heymann in his handling of the case.

When a company says that it's not worried about a competitor, it's a safe bet that it's worried about a competitor. And when that company is the notoriously close-mouthed Apple and its competitor, Samsung, is about to release a new version of its successful Galaxy S smartphone, you can double-down on that bet.

Following a shorter-than-usual development cycle, the popular openSUSE Linux distribution has released openSUSE 12.3, bringing a host of updates and improvements for the desktop, servers, and the cloud.

Netflix wants its open source software to become the preferred platform for massive cloud-based applications, so it has launched a cash-conferring contest to generate developer enthusiasm for its technology.

A company spun off from MIT is claiming it has cracked the holy grail of nuclear technology: a reactor design that runs on materials the industry currently discards as waste and which could meet all of the world's power demands for the next 70 years. It's also "walk-away safe," the designers claim, making it immune to the kind of meltdown that destroyed the Fukushima reactors.

Foxtel Australia boss Richard Freudenstein has picked up the IPFI megaphone and asked Australia's federal government to protect his business model from the rampant piracy that will doubtless emerge from the rollout of the National Broadband Network.

A server glitch that rendered the latest version of SimCity virtually unplayable mere hours after its launch could have easily been avoided, players say – because contrary to its publisher's claims, the game doesn't actually require network access at all.